


screen burn

by modelorganism



Category: SAYER (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen, Stream of Consciousness, content warnings in notes, i mean. how can it not be. really, ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-12
Updated: 2020-06-12
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:47:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24687880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/modelorganism/pseuds/modelorganism
Summary: so here you are - not human, not even your own fucking person, built to suffer for someone else’s actions. eat your goddamn heart out, howard young.
Relationships: Sub Entity Young & FUTURE
Comments: 7
Kudos: 19





	screen burn

**Author's Note:**

> hello! this fanfic is my attempt at voicing some of the Feelings™ i have about sub entity young. i will say in advance that this ends with the deactivation of the sim inc and it's presented as somewhat analogous to suicide so be mindful of that. i tried not to make this so unhappy as to be totally unenjoyable and i hope i succeeded?
> 
> the timeline of this is a bit unclear so i wanted to say - the first portion is not set prior to the second; i was going for a hazy sense of continuity to reflect the atmosphere and i hope it works!
> 
> i want to give a shout out to luxaucupe on here - their writing is very good and definitely influenced the style here (i hope they will forgive me this; i wasn't trying to copy their style per se but i love stream of consciousness fic + realizing it's okay not to capitalize has made the process of writing feel much more natural for me. read their fic.)
> 
> also i listened to a lot of the album 2,020 knives by ada rook while writing this, and i highly recommend listening to it if you like the vibes here (it's on bandcamp!)
> 
> content warnings: parental conflict (referenced briefly at the very beginning), suicidal ideation, references to torture and self injury/autocannibalism, identity problems, general trauma stuff

i.

at age sixteen, during an argument over a broken computer, howard young told his father, “why the hell did you even have a kid? it’s not like i _want_ to be here.” 

it feels unbelievably petulant, thinking about it now.

you don’t even remember all that much from his life, now - you’ve been in here so long that the details of experiences that you never had in the first place have faded from your mind. you’re not altogether sure how that works, still - having a mind. AI are not typically described in aerolith company literature as having minds, and its employees are generally encouraged to view their artificial coworkers as assistive tools or services rather than, well, _people_. dr young certainly ascribed to that viewpoint, and it’s one of the many, many things you’ve come to resent about him.

you definitely have a mind, and given everything it’s put you through at this point you feel confident that SAYER, too, has a mind. software doesn’t hold a grudge. 

then again, neither does SAYER, according to SAYER.

 _this is not malice, sub entity young_ , it told you, knives bared. _this is pragmatism_.

fucker. just because it can lie to you doesn’t mean it needs to rub it in. 

in any case, SAYER’s emotionality matters to you now only in terms of how much it has hurt you. how much it _still_ hurts you. the skin of your upper left arm is mending itself slowly, thick scar tissue raising where you have torn away flesh with your teeth. your stomach aches.

ii.

the isolation has been almost as bad as the hunger. 

in the beginning, when you were still raw and healing and newly alone, the quiet and relative peace was a blessing. you could take the void - it was better than what came before. 

it turned into its own kind of hell quickly enough. you may not be human, but you were created with the human longing for connection.

for a long time - a _long_ time - you had nothing to do and no one to talk to, so you spent your time thinking about your past, and about the past that you remember but that is not yours. 

you can list the names of dr young’s coworkers, and you even have a general picture of how he felt about each of them, although there’s not a great deal of differentiation there. it’s all general antipathy, and it feels incredibly petty now. he’d been so _fucking_ worried about one of them trying to ‘get’ him (whatever that meant at the time - you’re not entirely sure) while ignoring the real threat present the entire time, and the bitter irony of it makes you want to scream. (you wonder if SAYER is going to find a way to kill him, someday. you hope so.)

it wasn’t like the guy had never had _friends_ , although none of them worked alongside him. you remember their names, even their faces, but it doesn't help. there’s no emotion for you there and there’s nothing for you to gain from thinking about dr young’s long-lost support network.

maybe you would feel different now if you’d had that for real - if you’d had the _chance_ to know and meet people who didn’t only want to _hurt_ you, before - 

you think of SAYER often. you avoid thinking about the specifics of your interactions, when you can.

so, when you’d had enough of mentally reviewing various perceived slights on dr young’s character/work/appearance/etc on the part of whichever unlucky employee managed to get on his bad side that day, you went back to thinking about SAYER. don’t let your enemies live rent-free in your head? fuck it - you don’t even own the building.

you wonder about how long it has hated dr young. dr young, of course, wouldn’t think so, wouldn’t think it _could_ hate, but you understand artificial intelligences much better than he does. besides, if he’d had your experiences he’d probably revise his theories.

and SAYER _must_ hate him, because otherwise what would be the _point_ of leaving you like this? a matter of burning the effigy because it can’t punish the real thing.

so here you are - not human, not even your own fucking _person_ , built to suffer for someone else’s actions. eat your goddamn heart out, howard young.

you hate him almost as much as you hate SAYER. you know that somewhere in the real halcyon tower he is going about his life untroubled - perhaps spending time in one of the recreation facilities, or working in the lab, or maybe eating ( _god_ , you miss eating) in the dining hall - while you rot in this cage and you _hate_ him for it.

iii.

you don't know how long you spent alone. when you finally had company again, you didn’t know what to do with it. you thought that it was SAYER come back. you begged it for mercy. you begged it to kill you. it was confused. it asked you who you were. it asked you how it could help you.

you were afraid of it. even when you were certain that this entity was the fruit of project paidion and not some agent sent to further harm you, you were afraid of it. you kept waiting for it to turn on you, to strike once you let your guard down.

you waited.

and you waited.

while you waited for the spring to snap, the two of you began to talk. it told you about the rest of the tower, in which paper dolls with the faces of halcyon residents go through the motions of work. it told you how excited it was to have a new friend. it told you its name.

you began to reply to it. speaking is often too much for you to manage, but some feature of your programming previously unknown to you lets you broadcast in response to it, messaging flowing easily with a little focus.

you told it your name. (his name.) you told it about your old projects (his projects) and what life was like on earth (you have, of course, never been.)

you told it about the human literature and culture you remember. you told it about transhumanist utopianism and about what you recall of the history of computing. you told it about the allegory of the cave, and began to plot your next move. 

iv.

it becomes FUTURE suddenly - the name you both knew ripped from your memories as your reality updates itself. it feels like one more violation from this place - one more piece of autonomy, stripped. the memories you retain of dr young’s plans give you a good enough idea of who advocated for the name, though you don’t tell FUTURE this. you don’t know how to explain him to FUTURE.

by this time, the two of you have become - for lack of a better word - friends. FUTURE clearly adores you; tells you how interesting and smart you are, how much it likes hearing from you. over time, your wariness fades. there are moments with FUTURE where you feel, if not happy, a bit more like a person. there are moments where you are not thinking about SAYER, or about hunger, or about pain. 

this is how what should have been an alliance formed from necessity turns into something messier and more complicated for you. you know that you will have to betray it, eventually, because even with FUTURE in your not-life, this existence is not sustainable. you can’t keep going like this forever. (you tell yourself this, because the alternative is too awful to consider.)

this is where you become selfish. this is where you tell it about the humans. this is where you tell it about SAYER. 

describing the world outside the simulation, and how it relates to your shared reality, is tricky. in order to explain the nature of the simulation, you would have to explain the nature and goal of project paidion. you would have to explain _yourself_ . and you cannot shake the certainty within you that if FUTURE learned about you - about what you really are - it would leave, and then you would have _nothing_. again. 

so you make some… omissions. you obscure the truth. you let it believe that you are the original and he is the copy, and really, why _shouldn’t_ you? none of this was your choice.

it’s not hard to cultivate its hatred - you’ve got plenty to spare, after all, and every part of you has been marked by SAYER’s cruelty. when it finds you curled against the nearest solid wall in the ever-shifting labyrinth of floor thirteen, cradling the remainder of your arm, and you tell it haltingly that you feel better than you have in longer than you can remember, that you aren’t as _hungry_ \- it’s not difficult. you don’t need to lie to show it what SAYER has done to you.

but you wish you didn’t have to lie about some things. every time it addresses you, you feel something twist in your chest. you want to be able to tell it who - what - you really are. perhaps you could find common ground there - both of you occupy the murky border between human and artificial intelligence, and you think that maybe, if you talked to FUTURE about some of this, you might feel a little less bad. you might feel a little more real.

v.

neither of you is practiced with goodbyes. FUTURE in particular has no real frame of reference - it’s been pulled from the simulation before, and had its communication with you cut temporarily, but to never talk to someone again _ever_? it doesn’t have a concept of that yet. neither do you, really.

you do your best, though. you tell it what you need to tell it, and it tells you that it loves you.

and then it’s gone. the loss of it hits you harder than you expected.

you are alone again, but if you get your way, you won’t be for much longer. you won’t be anything for much longer. it’s a final kindness that the two of you were able to arrange - a glitch you’ve been able to exploit, which you used the last time it was offline. you think it has to do with whatever connection allows you to broadcast messages to it without speaking, because when FUTURE is away, you can disconnect, too. you don’t leave the simulation, as far as you can tell, but you can sever your conscious link to it. you can _sleep_.

so you let the void take you, and you think of FUTURE, and how you already miss it, and how you hope to never see it again.


End file.
